So Sandy kicked our ass when our back was turned, so what. One of the great things about being Long Islanders is that we don't take crap from anyone about anything, and we always take care of our own.

This week in the aftermath of Sandy, while we clean up our own houses, take stock of what we've lost and what we've gained through this experience, please keep the lesson of LITweetup Helps in your heart. A lot of people, making small efforts to help other people create big results.

Yes, give to the Red Cross and give to Island Harvest and do that as soon as you can and as much as you can. But I want to urge you to think much more local and much more micro as well. You and your neighbor both had to empty your fridges out as you hit the 3rd and 4th days of no power; does your neighbor have enough money to replace all that food for her family? Can you help there?

Maybe all your neighbors are in good shape right now. Is there a neighboring community that got hit harder and can you band together with your church or synagogue, or a group of neighbors, or friends in the office, and together help them somehow? Find out what they need and find an agency that's trying to get those services to them and donate what they need.

One example (and if you're in the area I invite you to join us): My church is adopting two locations; a neighborhood in Long Beach where residents have lost everything and are literally freezing at night because all their clothing is soaking wet and 2 buildings in Island Park where nearly 80 families (many with very young children) are without heat, power and food and other aid hasn't reached them yet. Want to help with this micro-effort?

The big agencies are doing miraculous work in enormous ways, but these micro-efforts by citizens and communities will fill the gaps for people that might otherwise have to wait. Want more ideas? In Brooklyn, Tony Bacigalupo of New Work City is coordinating NYC techies to help anyone who needs tech help after Sandy. The Business Corners in Hauppauge is offering free space to people who need somewhere to work for the rest of the week. Can you offer someone your skill or share your physical assets (maybe be a recharging station for people)?

Find a way to help your neighbors, LITweetup, there's no one better on the Island at it than you, and Long Island really needs you now.

There is nothing better than the incredible generosity of LITweetupers. I have been truly proud to work alongside you all for the last few years to help raise money and collect food for Island Harvest and always with the core idea of LITweetup in mind: get enough passionate people together, sharing with each other and incredible things will come out of it.

This year let's grow a bit and see if we can't push ourselves to help feed even more of our neighbors in need. Let's do a month of LITweetup Helps, starting with the meetup at artspace Patchogue (September 27th) and ending with the events during our partnership with Long Island Restaurant Week (November 4th - 11th). Can we as a community with extensive personal networks encourage many smaller events with the goal of great conversation and great generosity? Events like dinner parties with friends, lunch-ins at the companies we work at and own, meetups for clients to grow their brands, food drives at our places of worship, etc.

I'm betting we can and I think we should. I'll be reaching out to many of you over the next couple of weeks for your help and ideas to improve on my kernel of an idea. All of our best work in the past have been shaped and molded by the brilliance of our community, never by just one person; I know this years LITweetup Helps will be no different.

Let's help Island Harvest in their great work and let's work together to feed our hungry neighbors.

Firsts are awesome and LITweetup's been involved with a few; the first major social media event in Long Island, Social Media Camp LI, the first global social media event here, 140conf Local Long Island. And now we're very proud to attend the first Internet Week New York event ever held in Long Island, EGC's Long Island Digital Summit coming up this Tuesday, May 15th at the Crest Hollow Country Club.

EGC has put together a fantastic lineup of speakers for this half day summit and have managed to keep the cost very reasonable at $55. On top of that they've offered a 10% discount for LITweetup-ers, so be sure to get your ticket now if you still haven't and use discount code litweetup2012.

LITweetup is honored to host an "afterparty" for Long Island Digital Summit at Major's Steakhouse. This will be a tweetup in our usual style, no real agenda except for great conversation with incredible people who are working on exciting things. Since it's lunchtime, we 'll walk next door to Majors Steakhouse and grab some lunch (and maybe a drink if you're not headed back to the office) and we'll try to entice one or two of the speakers to join us. I'd really appreciate it if you could register here and let us know you're coming so I can try to give Majors a heads up.

FMC Folio Awards

The Fair Media Council’s Folio Awards is billed as the largest media event on Long Island and for the last couple of years LITweetup-ers have been winning awards there. Looking forward to my (@namnum) first time there, to seeing lots of friends and to a keynote by Donny Deutsch, the “last of the Madison Avenue wild men”. 2012 FMC Folio Awards will be held on Friday April 20, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Crest Hollow Country Club in Woodbury, N.Y.Get a Ticket

EGC Group’s Long Island Digital Summit Afterparty

We've talked about EGC group's Digital Summit before, but I wanted to give you a little heads up that thanks to an idea by Matt Moss (Director of Marketing & Social Media at IDS Audio Video & Technologies), LITweetup will host an after party. No details yet, but I'll be working it out with Matt, so watch the hashtag and make sure you have a ticket (use the 10% discount code:litweetup2012).LI Digital Summit

Had a conversation with Jackie DiBella and Tony Valado of The EGC Group the other morning about their upcoming half-day Long Island Digital Summit. They've got a great vision for this event and what it can offer to the Long Island professionals working in the digital space as well as the business community that is working to understand it. I'm very excited to see another quality event in the digital and social space happening on Long Island.

In case you're wondering, I'm going. Based on the Tony and Jackie's description, this is the type of event that fits my vision of what we need more of on Long Island; quality information, relevant speakers, value for our community and a potential to shine a light on our region nationally.

If you're able to come, use this discount code for a 10% discount: litweetup2012LI Digital Summit

2012 is here, time to do great things ladies and gentlemen.

In 2012 we kick off the year by putting our money where our mouth is. We've spoken often about Long Island having too many silos and how that prevents the sharing of great ideas. To kick off the year we'll be doing a combined tweetup with Social Media Club of Long Island (SMC-LI) and the folks over at DBMEI (Digital Brand Marketing Education).

Should I Come?

If you're a social media / marketing / PR nerd, this will be heaven for you, trust me.

If you've been to an LITweetup before, then duh. See you there.

If you 're a small business owner, journalist, artist, educator, parent, police officer, doctor, student or anybody else who's interested in how the world is changing because of these crazy new social communications technologies, this would be a smart place for you to be. You'll have a chance to meet real people who work and think about this stuff all the time without having to worry about being attacked by 'business card in your face' style networkers (more here).

Agenda, sort of

We tend to be really loose as far as agendas go, but this is what's on my mind right now:

Social Media Camp Long Island 2012

LITweetup Helps and the new partnership with LI Restaurant Week

The future of LITweetup - how can we tighten the tribe and do more important work together?

Holding hands around the campfire singing songs

I can't over-stress how excited I am that this is a combined event with SMC-LI and DBMEI. I'm excited Hilary came up with this great idea; the more often we can bring together smart passionate people who give a crap, the better.

Tomorrow night, Thursday 12/8/11 at The Business Corners LITweetup-er Basil Puglisi (@basilpuglisi) will be hosting a Holiday Networking Event. With tons of great food, an awesome location (we've done LITweetup events at the The Business Corners before) I was surprised when Basil told me it was free, but he was able to pull it off. The only thing he's asking is please bring along a donation for our friends at Island Harvest so we can help them feed our neighbors during the holiday season.

I'll (@namnum) be there helping out a bit, so hope to see you there if you can make it. RSVP on Facebook here.

Yeah I know, a little dramatic on the title, but hang in there, this is not a rant or a depressing story.In wrapping up this year's LITweetup Helps campaign I couldn't help but think about the fact that it was both an Epic Win and a Tragic Loss and it's important to us as a community to discuss them. Both are hugely telling about who we are and the impact we can have and tell a positive story about where we're going. That said if you only want to know the date of the next LITweetup, feel free to cheat and scroll to the end.

In keeping with the theme, please enjoy the dramatic subtitles

Of Tragic Loss

So you would think the tragic loss would be our much lower results this year than in previous years but that's not really it at all. I am disappointed that Helps didn't collect as much food to feed our neighbors as we historically have, but really this was a totally new direction for the campaign with awesome brand new partners, so it makes some sense that there'd be growing pains.

The tragic loss in this case was me (@namnum). And not in the "Oh whoa is me, I'm such a moron" kind of way but in the "if only I had remembered what makes LITweetup work so well" kind of way. I forgot that what has always made our endeavors succeed is the community coming together. We each do a little part or add a little bit and that makes the event/project wholly amazing.

So if the time machine I started work on was finished, I'd go back to August-Septemberish when I realized I was way over-committed and one of a couple dozen LITweetup leaders or, even better, just email the LITweetup Helps coordinators from previous years. Then I would comfort myself that the process of curated crowd-sourcing that we've refined over the past few years would do it's work.

For anyone that was disappointed, I am sorry that I didn't do that. But for the record, I am not sorry that we went ahead with Helps even though I knew I was starting too late to do it the right way. I still believe that some help given to Island Harvest is better than no help.

Of Epic Wins

The much more funner-er section of the post to write. There are many wins from this years Helps: among them, we helped Island Harvest feed some people, some smart restaurants got some great pr by doing a good thing, a few of us were able to get together and great conversations happened. But I count 2 Epic Wins.

1. The Community Still Came Together. Despite the last minute craziness, despite the many challenges in the way and despite the short time frame to get the word out, when LITweetup-ers found out Helps was happening, they got to work. In order to feed people, many leveraged their networks, used their personal and professional resources and sacrificed their time and treasure to make sure that Island Harvest would get as much support as possible to feed our hungry neighbors. Maybe I should be used to it by now, but I am truly in awe of what you all are able to make happen. It is remarkable what concerned individuals can do when they work together to help people in need. You guys rock!

2. We Have An Amazing New Partnership. Again, thanks to an LITweetup-er we have an opportunity to multiply our efforts to help Island Harvest in 2012. Lindsey Myers (@LindseyeMyers) of Word Hampton PR created a partnership between the LITweetup Helps campaign and this year's Long Island Restaurant Week. Not only did they feature our efforts to help Island Harvest on the home page but Lindsey & crew found 5 participating restaurants to serve as food collection spots and to host impromptu LITweetup Happy Hours, and it was all done in less than 2 weeks!

Of Kicking Butt in 2012

As a community we have talent, passion, love, compassion and a shared interest in improving our little corner of the world. The big lesson that I walk away from the 2011 Helps campaign with is this: we have made a difference in Island Harvest's mission to end hunger on Long Island, in 2012 by learning from the awesome and the less than awesome, we will make an even bigger difference.

I would love to hear your comments, thoughts, questions and criticisms so please hit me up in the comments below.

I'll see you guys at the Social Media Club Holiday Party this week or at the upcoming free LITweetup event with SMCLI in January (info to come but save the date, it's on January 25th). You can count on the January event to be back to a traditional LITweetup, very loose in format and very tight in terms of quality conversations with passionate talented Long Islanders.

Hey gang, Hilary Topper (@hilary25) has invited the #LITweetup crew to join Social Media Club for their Holiday Party. For those of you who haven't yet had a chance to get to one of the SMCLI monthly breakfasts, I hope you'll take my word for it; this is a great group of people, worth getting to know better.

Here's more about the event, copied from the eventbrite page:

Join us on Tuesday, December 6 from 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm for the Social Media Club of Long Island's Holiday Party at Frank's Steakhouse in Jericho. Meet and mingle with other social media enthusiasts. Tweet the night away as you enjoy wine, beer and soft drinks and a full array of delicious appetizers. You won't leave hungry!

In case you're thinking 'I'm not sure, $50 is a lot right now'... how about this? If this is your first SMCLI thing, and you decide to come, just come up to me at the party and say hi and for the next year (2012) you've got a permanent 10% discount off of any event I (@namnum) run, and I've got a few new things in the works. Fair enough?